Pressured

How to spell pressured

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce pressured

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does pressured mean?

1. verbPast tense of pressure: to have urged or coerced someone strongly into doing something.
2. adjectiveFeeling stressed or under strong demands to act in a particular way.

Pressured in a sentence

• verb

  The manager pressured his team to finish the report before the weekend.

• adjective

  He felt pressured by the constant stream of emails and calls.

• verb

  Her relatives pressured her to sell the family house quickly.

• adjective

  Many staff feel pressured to answer messages outside working hours.

Where does pressured come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb premere, meaning 'to press' or 'to push down', whose past participle pressus gave the late Latin noun pressura, literally 'a pressing'. English took 'pressure' through Old French in the 1300s, at first for physical compression and the squeezing of one thing against another. By the 1600s the word had broadened into the figurative sense of mental or social force bearing down on a person, and the verb 'to pressure', meaning to coerce or push someone toward an action, grew out of that. The form 'pressured' is simply that verb in its past tense and past participle, and it also works as an adjective describing someone weighed down by demands. The same premere root presses on a whole family of relatives, including 'compress', 'express' and 'depress', and the double 's' that trips writers up traces straight back to that Latin pressus.

How the word is built

• press (from Latin premere: to press)
• -ure (noun suffix forming 'pressure')
• -ed (past tense / adjectival suffix)